Thanks, daenerys! :)
KatieHartman
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you’ve provided says:
[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it “fooled me badly in a blind tasting”.
But reading Bittman’s piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.
I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don’t see the ethical problems with it don’t want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There’s demand for in-vitro meat because there’s demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.
Maybe it’s likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I’d assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes − 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.
If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn’t buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.
I’m really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.
Expect the next batch on Monday, including the panel on death (lovingly dubbed the atheist death panel by the moderator, Jesse Galef) featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, Julia Galef, and James Croft!
It’s possible that they’ll be up sooner, but as far as I understand it, our videographer (Rob Lehr) is taking a well-deserved break.
We’re treading close to terminal values here. I will express some aesthetic preference for nature qua nature.
That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value. In those terms, nature is bad. Really, really bad.
I also recognize a libertarian attitude that we should allow other individuals to live the lives they choose in the environments they find themselves to the extent reasonably possible.
It seems arbitrary to exclude the environment from the cluster of factors that go into living “the lives they choose.” I choose to not live in a hostile environment where things much larger than me are trying to flay me alive, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume that most other conscious beings would choose the same if they knew they had the option.
Absent strong reasons otherwise, “do no harm” and “careful, limited action” should be the default position. The best we can do for animals that don’t have several millennia of adaptation to human companionship (i.e. not dogs, cats, and horses) is to leave them alone and not destroy their natural habitat.
Taken with this...
We need to value the species as a whole, not just the individual members; and we need to value their inherent nature as predators and prey.
...it seems like you don’t really have a problem with animal suffering, as long as human beings aren’t the ones causing it. But the gazelle doesn’t really care whether she’s being chased down by a bowhunter or a lion, although she might arguably prefer that the human kill her if she knew what was in store for her from the lion.
I still don’t know why you think we ought to value predators’ “inherent nature” as predators or treat entire species as more important than their constituent individuals. My follow-up questions would be:
(1) If there were a species of animal who fed on the chemicals produced from intense, prolonged suffering and fear, would we be right to value its “inherent nature” as a torturer? Would it not be justifiable to either destroy it or alter it sufficiently that it didn’t need to torture other creatures to eat?
(2) What is the value in keeping any given species in existence, assuming that its disappearance would have an immense positive effect on the other conscious beings in its environment? Why is having n species necessarily better than having n-1? Presumably, you wouldn’t want to add the torture-predators in the question above to our ecosystem—but if they were already here, would you want them to continue existing? Are worlds in which they exist somehow better than ours?
We have neither the knowledge nor the will to protect individual, non-pet animals.
We certainly know enough to be able to cure their most common ailments, ease their physical pain, and prevent them from dying from the sort of injuries and illnesses that would finish them off in their natural environments. Our knowledge isn’t perfect, but it’s a stretch to say we don’t have “the knowledge to protect” them. I suspect that our will to do so is constrained by the scope of the problem. “Fixing nature” is too big a task to wrap our heads around—for now. That might not always be the case.
When you ask, “Assuming that these environments are (or would be) on the whole substantially better on the measures that matter to the individual living in them, why shouldn’t we?” it’s not clear to me whether you’re referring to why we shouldn’t move humans into virtual boxes or why we shouldn’t move animals into virtual boxes, or both.
Both.
If you’re talking about humans, the answer is because we don’t get to make that choice for other humans. I for one have no desire to live my life in Nozick box, and will oppose anyone who tries to put me in one while I’m still capable of living a normal life.
Then that environment wouldn’t be better on the measures that matter to you, although I suspect that there is some plausible virtual box sufficiently better on the other measures that you would prefer it to the box you live in now. I have a hard time understanding what is so unappealing about a virtual world versus the “real one.”
If you’re referring to animals, the argument is similar though more indirect. Ultimately humans should not take it upon themselves to decide how another species lives.
This suggests to me that you haven’t really internalized exactly how bad it is to be chased down by something that wants to pin you down and eat parts of you away until you finally die.
The burden of proof rests on those who wish to tamper with nature, not those who wish to leave it alone.
To prove what?
It’s an interesting theory, but I’m hesitant to give much weight to weakly-supported hypotheses intended to explain very broad and inclusive phenomena, like “murders (or a lack thereof) occurring within these arbitrary geographical borders.” This is especially true when there’s no shortage of plausible theories and a lot of potentially-useful information is missing.
The changeling myths seem to serve the purpose of guilt-relief only insofar as they also aid shame-relief, so I″m not sure they’re all that helpful. (Am I missing something?)
Basically, this reads to me like an interesting but not particularly credible just-so story.
I met Jesse Galef last year, and we became fast friends—at which point he practically begged me to read Methods of Rationality and LW. Good on you, Jesse!
This year I was the organizer for Skepticon, a conference that has traditionally concerned itself with the atheist movement. Eliezer, Julia Galef, Richard Carrier, and Spencer Greenberg were kind enough to come speak on topics more pertinent to the rationalist community (Bayes’ theorem saw lots of love, and LW was plugged in several of the presentations!). Attendance was just over 1,100, and many of the attendees I spoke with were overjoyed to see more than just the “yes, there are probably no gods” spiel. I overheard one of them tell Eliezer that she felt like his talk had revealed a “next step” in her personal growth as a freethinker.
The whole experience has left me with the suspicion that the atheist community might not be as tapped for rationalism as it could be—and that just might be one of the better places to go looking. Lately, there’s been a huge upsurge in atheist/secular activism at the college level, and as far as I know, these groups aren’t being particularly targeted.
This was my first reaction, too. I recall my car-buying experience consisting mostly of me trying to keep up with my impressions about seat-feel, head space, visibility, dash design, etc. and trying to somehow aggregate that information with numbers that I really didn’t know how to process in the first place (e.g. safety ratings, scores from reviews, prices vs. upkeep costs). It wasn’t until I’d pretty much picked out my car that I made an effort to mentally simulate a typical drive.
I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. … People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?
It is precisely this kind of thinking, fostered by a pretty low-par early education in math and physics, that led me to believe that knowledge in these areas is virtually useless to just about everyone. And so I passed my one and only college math course in my first semester, filled in my hard science requirements with courses like Environmental Geology, and moved on.
I was wrong. So very, very wrong. Where isn’t math useful? I’ll refrain from preaching to the choir and instead just ask “Why?” Why do you feel the need to disparage these fields in order to make a point about the usefulness of music theory?
Even if you assume that societies are more likely to structure their gender constructs around innate psychological traits than physical traits (or that the former would result from the latter), you’ve got a major confound when assessing the strength of the effect.
It’s not difficult to show that biological sex predicts some features of perceptual/cognitive ability. It is difficult to show that people of a gender that is generally trained to work with refrigerators have, as an innate feature of their psychology, an effective strategy for searching fridges.
It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they’ll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).
Kudos to Julia for not only introducing a solid take on the relationship between reasoning and emotion, but also for doing so in a way that had the audience eating out of her hand. Of all the Skepticon talks that dealt with rationality, I think this was received the most enthusiastically.
She handled the impromptu voice-over brilliantly, too! I nearly strangled the sound guy.
This seems irresponsible and unwise when you have substantial fixed costs, all necessary for core activities, and not much in the way of back-up resources. I can see it feasibly leading to a bunch of problems, including (a) the incentive to save up financial resources rather than put them to use toward high-EV activities and (b) difficulty hiring staff smart enough to realize that the resources from which their salaries are paid out will be highly variable month-to-month.
One of the major challenges to evo-psych hypotheses about gender is never really tackled in the original comment thread: that women and men are conditioned differently in almost all current and historical societies, so it’s almost impossible to differentiate effects of training from inborn psychological phenomena.
Basically: if you’re the one who’s always been expected to put the groceries away, do the cooking, and set the table, you’ve probably developed a pretty good strategy for getting the damn ketchup out of the fridge.
Of course, we could always argue that women are almost always socialized for these roles because they have an evolution-granted knack for them, but then we’ll be tasked with finding a large enough (and representative enough) population that hasn’t had any of that conditioning.
- 14 Dec 2011 13:30 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on [SEQ RERUN] Rational vs Scientific Ev-Psych by (
For the record, the chicken that survived had retained most of the brainstem. He was able to walk (“clumsily’) and attempted some reflexive behaviors, but he was hardly “functional” to anyone who knows enough about chickens to assume that they do more than walk and occasionally lunge at the ground.
The chicken’s ability to survive with only the brain stem isn’t shocking. Anencephalic babies can sometimes breathe, eat, cry, and reflexively “respond” to external stimuli. One survived for two and a half years. This was a rare case, but so was the chicken—there were other attempts to keep decapitated chickens alive, and none have been successful.
This isn’t to say that we don’t have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals or treat reflexive behaviors as meaningful—we do. But pointing that out isn’t where the conversation ends. Chickens are an easy target because common knowledge dictates that they’re stupid animals, because most people haven’t spent any substantial amount of time with them and assume there isn’t anything particularly interesting about their behavior, and because we have a vested interest in believing that there’s nothing of value going on in their brains.
I’ve become an insufferable list-maker. I’ve been meaning to start a blog, largely to improve my ability to organize and effectively communicate challenging concepts. Every time I sit down to “start work on the blog,” I find myself ending up with a stack of lists—what needs to be done, topic ideas, features of the website design, people to partner/affiliate/guest blog with, hooks for a viral video blog, and so on. Rinse and repeat—a new stack of lists every time.
I didn’t dispute Eugine’s argument - I just thought it worthwhile to point out that the evidence itself is obviously confounded. If we consider the confound itself—the gender-based training—evidence of the hypothesis, we’re stuck in a tricky chicken-and-egg situation. It wasn’t a refutation of Eugine’s comment, but I hardly think it’s irrelevant.
Do the test with cooks of both genders; their experience of using fridges is unlikely to differ significantly in length.
Unless female cooks are more likely to become professionals as the result of early and consistent pressure (as opposed to other motivations) and more likely to do the grocery shopping/cooking at home, etc. You can try to control for gender conditioning, but it’s pervasive enough to be a significant challenge.
Do another test with women raised in feminist families and compare to general population.
I’m not sure ‘feminist household’ is equatable to ‘egalitarian household,’ in practice—but even if it were, self-identifying as feminist is not the same thing as somehow overcoming all early gender conditioning.
I’m not sure how valid your point is in practice. Being enthusiastic about hunting does not necessarily indicate a willingness to face the consequences of one’s actions, nor does it indicate any particular attitude toward factory farming. It may just indicate a lack of visceral discomfort when encountering animal suffering.
It is plausible that some/many/most hunters simply enjoy pursuing and eating prey, and that the comparative advantages to overall utility make little or no difference to them. In this case, I wouldn’t say that the utility advantage says anything positive about the individual’s character, but I certainly do think it’s fortunate that self-serving behaviors can occasionally lead to greater overall utility.
(Note: I’m sure there are hunters who subsist on hunted meats because they find mainstream meat production ethically appalling. I just doubt that they’re representative of all hunters.)
That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they’re going about it the wrong way.
From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option—though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it’s worth, I can’t think of an organization I’d trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they’re pushing fundraising, I’d estimate with high confidence that it’s because that’s where the bottleneck is.
I think donating x hours-worth of income is, with few exceptions, a better route than trying to donate x hours of personal time, especially when you consider that managing external volunteers/having discussions (a perhaps-unpredictable percentage of which will be unproductive) is itself more costly than accepting money.
I’d be willing to guess that the next best thing to donating money would be to pitch CFAR to/offer to set up introductions with high-leverage individuals who might be receptive, but only if that’s the sort of thing (you have evidence for believing) you’re good at.
Also, sharing information about the fundraising drive via email/Facebook/Twitter/etc. is probably worth the minimal time and effort.